6 min readApr 18, 2026 02:34 PM IST First published on: Apr 18, 2026 at 02:34 PM ISTWith the defeat of the government over the proposed constitutional amendment, there will now be sound and fury over the “anti-women” Opposition. Or, perhaps, bugles for a mid-term election may be sounded. Clever manipulation is part of politics. Even then, it is sad that the enhanced representation of women was weaponised as a smokescreen. When policies serve as a smokescreen, they neither benefit society nor strengthen democracy.While a 33 per cent reservation, with rotation, is not the best way to ensure fair representation of women, there has been a reasonable amount of formal agreement on the issue by now. It’s another matter that most parties still fail to give more tickets to women voluntarily. If the government had truly been keen on women’s reservation, this measure could have been implemented for the 2024 Lok Sabha election. There was no need to go through a controversial exercise and complicate the issue.AdvertisementBut perhaps the ruling party – like other parties too — did not want to unsettle the interests of male representatives. To assuage their apprehensions, the solution of expanding the available pool of seats must have seemed attractive, leading the government to combine women’s reservation with the expansion of the strength of the legislature.Again, like women’s reservation, this expansion too is an attractive and perhaps welcome proposal. It is welcome in a theoretical sense — each representative will represent fewer voters if legislatures are expanded. Cynics may wonder what real advantage will accrue to voters as a result. It will lead, on the contrary, to more bosses over citizens because our representatives have long ceased to be representative, much less public servants. Our politics and the behaviour of representatives often breed this cynicism. But even if one were not to take this cynical view and welcome the expansion of legislatures, it was bound to be mired in complication if it were to be tied to a new delimitation exercise.Must Read | A political setback for the government, a democratic opening for the oppositionIf the government simply proposed increasing the number of seats in legislatures and ensured that delimitation will be carried out only within the states to adjust for the extra seats, then perhaps the Opposition and southern states may have been tempted to agree to this move. In other words, the current impasse needs to be seen as the government’s effort to force a new delimitation by hiding behind a women’s cause and breaching the 50-year-old consensus on freezing the current strength of states in the Lok Sabha.AdvertisementThis begs the question: Did Narendra Modi do all this only to expose the Opposition? Did he do it only to ensure his name remains in the history of gender justice? Or, did the government seek to sugarcoat the bitter capsule of delimitation by wrapping it with the less controversial measures of women’s reservation and expansion of legislative seats? If the latter is the case, the government has only tied itself into a knot. The issue of delimitation has now become even more intractable.The forthcoming delimitation was going to be a tricky political challenge with the states of the south complaining against the possible reduction of their representation in Lok Sabha and the northern states expecting a bounty. That challenge required statesmanship and a spirit of compromise. The attempt to smuggle in a new delimitation through the women’s reservation issue has only added to suspicion and distrust between the Opposition and the government on the one hand and the Union government and the states of south India. In addition to thus adding to the politics of distrust, and in tune with the prevailing ethos of high-handedness, the proposed amendments sought to make all decision-making more pro-executive, arbitrary and bordering on the authoritarian.But more than its authoritarian tilt, the latest exercise should alert citizens to two other serious issues involved in this episode. The ease with which the BJP sought to dispense with the concerns of the southern states indicates a weakening of the goal and practice of federalism. This is not surprising because Hindutva has always been wary of federalism. This stems from the unitary idea of nationalism and therefore, it is qualitatively different from the cynical and power-oriented neglect of the federal principle by earlier governments. The emphasis on “double-engine sarkar” is not merely for party political gain, but for a larger purpose which many have failed to comprehend.you may likeAlso Read | Shashi Tharoor writes: The Trojan Horse of delimitation, and fundamental questions about the design of our democracySecondly, central to this current development is the politics of imposing a different meaning of India and the Indian nation. There is an unarticulated feeling among many sections that the idea of India is best understood, practised and shaped through a certain north Indian (read Hindi heartland) imagination. This feeling is sometimes expressed through an insistence on Hindi, more often through a belief that there is no difference between north and south — by implication, the north represents India.Therefore, today, when we debate the nuances of certain constitutional amendments, it is not sufficient to focus on legal-constitutional arguments and the fine print of the Bills, nor to be carried away by the democratic romance of gender justice, or bogged down by the nitty-gritty of delimitation and the democratic-seeming argument that representation in Lok Sabha is only about numbers. Beyond all these, and beyond questions about the legitimacy of procedures, are far more substantial questions of federalism, nationalism and the meaning of India.In this sense, for the BJP, far more than nari shakti was at stake. The lesson is that when an acceptable measure is pushed in bad faith, it doesn’t sanitise bad faith, it betrays the real motives and could well help the Opposition intellectually grasp the nature of the contest that lies ahead.The writer, based in Pune, taught Political Science